The advantages of early detection of potential lesions and suspicious masses within bodily tissue have been well-established. Increasingly, screening for common cancers of the breast, lung, colon, and prostate has gained support and acceptance in the medical community, but improvements in the sensitivity and specificity of the techniques remain key and are readily identifiable objectives.
Of particular interest is the area of mammographic screening. After a given age or maturity, normally beginning at age 40, it is common for women to undergo periodic examinations, wherein film-based and/or digital x-ray screening mammograms are obtained. While significant advances have been made, current screening approaches may provide mammograms with insufficient “sensitivity” to allow for the detection of the presence of a potential lesion, thereby resulting in a “false negative”. Further, current screening approaches may provide mammograms with insufficient “specificity” to allow for accurate characterization of detected suspicion tissue masses, thereby potentially resulting in “false positives”.
Presently, in the event of an equivocal screening mammogram, a callback examination may be conducted, wherein a diagnostic mammogram is obtained and/or an ultrasound imaging procedure is performed, thereby entailing another patient office visit, additional medical personnel time and increased cost. More particularly, an ultrasound examination may be utilized (e.g. as opposed to a biopsy) to rule out the presence of a solid mass. In this regard, current practice can entail free-hand ultrasound imaging during which a specialist manipulates a hand-held probe relative to a patient's breast while viewing a display to obtain depth-profile information. As may be appreciated, the ability to mentally correlate such depth-profile information with the location of a potential lesion/suspicious mass visualized on an x-ray image can be quite challenging, thereby sometimes compromising characterization efforts. Moreover, such procedures are time consuming and entail significant expertise. These considerations present significant limitations to the realization of increased efficacies and efficiencies of practice.